I love this. I do wonder though if anyone can educate me on the choice to do a monthly sponsorship? I think that's awesome but at the same time, there are a lot of developers I want to send 10 dollar tips to for that library that they made.
Just wondering if there's a reason to not have both. My guess is that foregoing one time transactions in favour of ensuring that people gravitate towards making a more sustainable donation seemed like a rational choice. Pure speculation there so if there's any other reason why it wasn't done I'd be really grateful if anyone from Github might be able to share.
I also think it's about sustainability. As a developer receiving an X amount every month (+/- Y%) can heavily reduce the financial risk and help plan better.
I'm currently not developing any open source software but if I was and worked as a freelancer knowing that by the end of the month I'll receive $500 for GitHub would allow me to balance my open source work with the freelance work, ensuring I have enough money to support myself.
If they offered both (monthly and one-time payments) then the solution would be to allow the project to allow only one or the other or both or neither. So you could select that you'd only receive monthly payments and people wouldn't be able to send you one-time payments.
Even better (imo), try to buffer one time payments over months. This (and other similar features) could allow a developer to see upcoming income from OSS, if it's declining, etc.
Being able to predict how much you're going to make it hugely helpful imo. Especially if you're a freelancer. You might see that in 3 months your funds are drying up, so plan accordingly.
Just brainstorming: But "similar features" could be trying to favor longer term donations. If a user wants to donate $20/m, maybe ask them for $10/m for 3 month increments?
Though, I suppose this isn't any better than the developer themself buffering funds in their bank. BUT, it seems like a meaningful concept, regardless.
Instead of enabling one-time donations, I see some value in sponsorships with a predetermined EOL: Instead of donating $10 one-time, get a 10-month sponsorship for $1 each and at the end of those 10 months, decide whether you want to continue supporting the developer. Github could charge you the $10 (or the interest-adjusted equivalent) up-front to decrease the transaction costs too.
This decreases the variation in the developer's income and lets them plan for the future accordingly, which is always a good thing.
I only have experience in non-development creative work, but one-off payments/donations are much more anxious than monthly. Sales of t-shirts/songs/ebooks could be higher than what I get monthly on Patreon now, but:
1: I could never be sure. One month it was $0, the next it was $3, the next it was $40. This is impossible to plan around. It's even worse now with everything moving to SaaS. It's easier to justify a subscription to something like EastWest Composer Cloud or Splice when I have a bunch of people subscribing to my work who've been there for months or a year.
2: I didn't know who they were. This was fine in the good months, but then I hit long stretches with nothing coming in, and I had no idea why. Did the platform make some change? Did my products fall out of fashion? I was at the mercy of opaque storefront logic and priorities.
And I don't mean in the creepy surveillance state sense. I know most of the people subscribing to me on Patreon through Mastodon. When they unsubscribe, I know why because they tell me. I sold tens of t-shirts years ago. I've never seen someone wear one. Nobody sent me an email. Sales collapsed one day and never returned. Patreon subscribers tell me good things about my music and writing all the time.
Neither of these is 100% a problem with one-off contributions, but the level of communication never matched this.
This is my experience as well. I've done both, and made more money off one-time software sales (rather than patreon-supported OSS) but it was completely unpredictable. There are toxic outcomes from that: you start tailoring your output to what you think the market will do big numbers on, rather than what's good. Being a small business person can be brutal and it doesn't always lead to you doing good work: it can lead to very cynical exploitation of your perceived market, just to survive for another month.
Just wondering if there's a reason to not have both. My guess is that foregoing one time transactions in favour of ensuring that people gravitate towards making a more sustainable donation seemed like a rational choice. Pure speculation there so if there's any other reason why it wasn't done I'd be really grateful if anyone from Github might be able to share.